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Comment by ackalker | Hacker News Reader

Nice writeup, but[1] I'm wondering, could the author have saved himself from a lot of grief by not using an ancient, outdated bootloader in the first place?

[1]: I don't want to spoil the fun, but look at [2] in the article and wonder: who the hell is still using grub 1? Even mainstay isolinux (which in addition has to deal with lots of weird / broken BIOS implementations of cd booting (El Torito, anyone?)) does a lot better.

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Because in 2009 grub 2 was a dreadful EFI bootloader and there were working patches for grub legacy. We shipped the bootloader we had, not the bootloader we wished we had.

This article was written in November 2009 and is 5 years old.

afaict, work on grub2 started back in 2004, and a backport patch[1] of the 'paranoid' A20 checking for grub legacy was posted to the bug-grub mailing list back in 2006.

In fact, the very first reply[2] to that patch makes exactly the same point I did above: why not use grub2?

[1]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grub/2006-07/msg00015....

[2]: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grub/2006-07/msg00025....

The rest of the discussion on the email thread from 2006 on the A20 patch is about whether GRUB 2 is ready for use in production environments, so I am not sure what your point is.

My point wasn't that GRUB 2 did not exist in 2009, but that "Who the hell is still using grub 1?" was not as valid a question then, and is definitely not a reason for you to dismiss the article.

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